A group of 16 ex-military and police officers were sentenced to life imprisonment by the Federal Criminal Court #1 of Rosario on Monday. The former officials were convicted of crimes against humanity committed in clandestine centers in the Greater Rosario area during the last civic-military dictatorship.

This was the first time that members of the dictatorship’s Federal Police task force stationed in Rosario had stood trial, and the first conviction for five officers (Juan Carlos Faccendini, Oscar Roberto Giai, Juan Félix Retamozo, Roberto Raúl Squiro and Osvaldo Tebez). The rest of the repressors — Pascual Oscar Guerrieri, Jorge Alberto Fariña, Juan Daniel Amelong, Marino González, Ariel López, Juan Andrés Cabrera, Rodolfo Isach, Walter Pagano, Eduardo Costanzo, Federico Almeder, and Enrique Andrés López — had already been convicted as part of the “mega case” known as “Guerrieri IV.” 

The court formed by judges Carlos Lascano, María Noel Costa and Mariela Rojas served life sentences for crimes that included aggravated homicide, qualified torture, qualified torment, enforced disappearance, child abduction, and kidnapping against 116 people, 62 of whom had not been considered in previous trials. Of those 62 victims, 54 were forcibly disappeared or murdered.

The court also accepted the prosecutor and plaintiffs’ request to expand the charges to include crimes against the victims’ children, each of whom was underage at the time. The victims were transported through different clandestine centers of detention, torture, and extermination in Rosario, Funes, and Granadero Baigorria. 

The trial marks the first prosecution of crimes committed at the former Salesian Home “Ceferino Namuncurá” in Funes — a location managed by the Catholic Church. The plaintiffs had asked that the site be formally recognized as an official clandestine center of detention because at least three of the victims had been illegally detained there, but the request was denied in the court’s final decision. 

–With information from Télam